Trevor's Blog

Darin McCLoud is a nice guy who had a recent bad experience with the press. He’s a diabetic and has had problems with his his weight for as long as he remembers. Having failed with diets on repeated occasions he believed that a gastric bypass was the best way to remedy the problem. However, when he approached his GP he discovered he wasn’t yet fat enough to qualify – at least not in his area. He needed to be 21 stone where he lived, but only 19 a few miles up the road. It was the postcode lottery we all hear about. Now Darin is a trade unionist and has a strong sense of social justice, so he went to the press with a solution that was intended to highlight the absurdity of his situation: he told them he was deliberately overeating to get him up to the 21 stone target.

The response from the press was far in excess of what he hoped – but not in the way he’d intended. The press whipped themselves up into a frenzy over this example – in their view – of a lazy, fat, stupid, selfish man. Film crews from as far as Germany asked him for interviews, and the exposure got so bad that he felt intimidated leaving the house. Shopping became impossible. As a traffic warden he was used to being hated – but for the thing he did, not the person he was.

I heard about his story and offered to help. I’d recently been on the receiving end of a journalist happy to twist my message for a ten second headline so there was a sense of kindred spirits from the moment we met. I also hoped for the opportunity to make a point.

Everywhere I look I seem to see a story about how gastric surgery – bypass or band – is the solution to our obesity epidemic. At £12,000 a pop I can see why the surgeons are pushing for this to be true, but in my opinion it’s madness. We’ve hundreds of thousands of people who are obese, and we’re going to cut them open. Seriously?

I’ve worked with people with weight issues for nearly twenty years, and I’ve had many clients who learned to respond to bad experiences through a distorted relationship to food – some by restricting their intake, some by doing the opposite. my strong belief is that gastric surgery might help an unhappy fat person lose weight, but without addressing the psychological reason why they overeat in the first place what you’ll have afterwards is just an unhappy less fat person. In essence you’re just sticking a plaster over the problem and I think it’s likely that the continued unhappiness will often lead to another harmful behaviour.

The whole concept of surgery perpetuates the idea that food is the enemy and our body is a battleground – that’s it’s purely a physical problem to be solved. But food is just energy and a thing we enjoy the taste of. In my opinion, if it has any greater significance in your life it has ceased to be food and become a symbol for something else – like love, company, comfort, rebellion, or safety.

What I’m suggesting is that many people have formed an emotional relationship to food as an antidote to feelings they experienced about themselves when they were younger. 90% of what we do is driven by the unconscious – at least that’s what scientists are saying – and I think that includes those times when we are driven to act in ways we wouldn’t consciously choose. That includes pretty much every problem clients bring to therapy: being scared of things most people aren’t, feeling anxious when most people aren’t, doing things that you’d like not to – like smoking or under/overeating – or not being able to do things that you would like to. They are all responses driven by your unconscious. The good news is that they all have a positive intention. Your unconscious is trying to protect you, it’s just doing so based on some faulty programming from when you were younger. Fix the programming and you fix the problem.

So Darin came to see me. We had one session and he identified the source of his connection to food and changed it. I recorded a download for him to listen to every night – similar to the ones dozens of people have lost weight with since they were launched on the Thinkingslimmer site. Did it work for him? Well, Darin responded to his experience with the press in the same way I did. He’s blogging about it. You can read how he’s doing now here.

What I want you to pay most attention to is his attitude. It’s great that he’s getting slimmer – but it’s even more important that he’s getting happier. Feeling in control of his choices is a key element of that, and his ability to change his attitude to food becomes a great symbol of his ability to change his life. If you can change the thing that has defined you for most of your adult life, what else are you capable of achieving? Helping clients answer that question is one of the things that keeps me loving what I do. In my opinion the world is going to see a very different Darin in the future.

Would this work with everyone? Of course not, nothing does, and I’m not saying that all weight issues are psychologically driven – for where that’s not the case gastric bands may even be the answer.

But if you have a problem I’d invite you to apply my description of where they come from to it and see if it resonates with you, because if it does, my message is you can change. Our minds are plastic, they’re changing all the time. The only problem is, if faulty programming is driving the change you tend to become more of what you don’t want to be. Darin is a good example of how, if you’re helped to write your own program, you can become much more of who you would like to be. Seeing a Cognitive Hypnotherapist could be where the re-writing of yourself begins.

There’s an interesting new treatment that has been shown to be effective with anxiety and addictions and which is now being tested for PTSD. It’s called Cognitive-bias modification (CBM) and can have a positive effect in a short space of time.

It is based on the idea that many psychological problems are caused by unconscious biases. For example, if a brain has an attentional bias towards threats it’s likely to lead to anxiety. An obvious example of a more specific bias would be a phobia, where the brain is strongly biased to find an object like a dog or a spider threatening, or a situation frightening , like public speaking.

What CBM is looking to achieve is to alter these biases, and they’ve found doing so is surprisingly simple (of course I would say, so have we). Their approach is to sit someone in front of a computer screen and show them two words or pictures, one neutral and one negative – so in the case of someone with social anxiety it could be a neutral face and a threatening face. Clearly their bias will cause them to automatically focus on the threatening face. The computer program, however, causes them to complete tasks involving the neutral picture. Repeating this procedure around a thousand times over a two hour period retrains the brain to no longer focus on the negative – and that change is carried back into the world.

I found this interesting because in Cognitive Hypnotherapy we also focus on such biases. We believe that all behaviour has a purpose, so any negative behaviour that a client wants to change is the result of an unconscious bias the brain has learnt to value. Negative behaviour is just the brains response to something it’s learnt to believe is relevant to our survival. I’ll give an example: We all have moments in our life when we’ve felt that we’re not as good as other people (or is it just me, my students and my clients?). This can lead to us experiencing various degrees of fear – of rejection, or failure – or anxiety, or anger or jealousy. The list goes on.

My point is that each of us will respond to what happens to us in a unique, and not entirely predictable way as our attentional biases develop based on the meaning we give to the things that happen to us. An experience of childhood abuse may turn one person into an abuser, and the other into a social worker. A perception of rejection could lead to someone becoming celibate or promiscuous, a feeling of being unloved to a life of obesity or anorexia. And the fact that all of the negative events could lead to any one of the problems described is why we do not believe in diagnosing problems. Labels limit. Each client has arrived at their problem behaviour through a unique series of life events, and each is maintained by a unique pattern of thoughts and behaviours. In Cognitive Hypnotherapy we map this problem pattern and match it to interventions from a range of approaches that fit the client – not the label – in order to change their biases. CBM is a welcome addition, and we see Cognitive Hypnotherapy as a model that informs therapists about which choices are most likely to work with which client, rather than see each approach as a silver bullet aimed at a particular diagnosis.

I think it’s inevitable that in our life journey our brain is bound to develop these attentional biases: some things in our environment will be viewed as more relevant to us than others because of what the brain has learnt (or mis-learnt) they represent – that food is love, people equal danger, or cigarettes equal company. Our brain is plastic, so anything can become associated with any meaning – which is why you might be the only person in the room who stands on a chair in the presence of a mouse, or who stuffs cake after an emotional day.

We suggest these negative behaviours arise because, if the relevance is accompanied by a strong emotional reaction, the bias could lead to control being wrenched away from you by your unconscious and it launching you into an automatic action intended to protect or reward you; an action you have little or no control over. For want of a better word we call this a trance. A jealous rage, eating the chocolate that you know you don’t need, smoking the fag you want to quit, running away from the thing you shouldn’t be afraid of, becoming tongue tied in the presence of someone you want to impress; in Cognitive Hypnotherapy they’re all examples of trance states the unconscious generates in order to control your actions.

On our hypnotherapy courses we train our therapists to identify these trance states, and we teach a wide variety of techniques to help each client adapt their biases so the unconscious no longer feels the need to respond to a situation that used to be negative. In effect we’re ‘de-hypnotists’: we enable the client to remain awake and in control of their actions during the times when they used to be at the mercy of their biases. And then we go further. We help them introduce attentional biases into their unconscious that leads to them becoming more aware of everything around them that would be evidence of their improvement. How much better would you life be if your unconscious was tuned to choose first those things around you that leave you feeling loved, secure, safe and happy? We think that’s eminently doable.

We often think of conforming as being a sign of weakness, and often applaud and admire the person who swims against the current. However, it would appear that the urge to conform comes directly from the brain, and my guess is that it’s a behaviour designed to help us thrive within a group – we like people who are like us, and who like us – no wonder we say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. A clever piece of recent research demonstrates how subtly it influences us.

Zaki, Schirmer and Mitchell, three psychological scientists from Harvard University had men look at 180 images of women and rate their attractiveness. As they did so a score was flashed on the screen beside their score, indicating how several hundred other male participants in the experiment had voted. In reality a computer randomly assigned a number higher or lower than their vote if they had judged someone particularly unattractive or attractive. They were then shown the same pictures again and asked to revote. Unerringly, if the other participants had voted higher than them, they revised their score upwards. If the opposite was true, they revised it lower. Amazingly, how attractive you find someone is influenced by the opinion of those around you.

This unconscious need to conform has massive implications in our daily lives. I was reminded of another study which showed that hanging out with fat friends led to you putting on weight. It seems we unconsciously seek to adapt to the norm, because, from an evolutionary point of view, what is different to the group is potentially dangerous to the group. You see it in the way people in groups tend to dress similarly, adopt an ‘in’ language and imitate physical actions and expressions – especially of those higher up the hierarchy. Experiments have shown on numerous occasions that, after a group has formed, they begin to discriminate against people outside of that group in a very short space of time. No wonder we do what we can to demonstrate that we ‘belong’.

So, if our brains are geared to adapt our behavior, our beliefs and values, and even our appearance according to our environment, how can we use this to be happier, or more successful, or healthier?

I suggest you look first at your network of friends. What might your brain be adapting to there? Are they positive people? Supportive? Do they encourage you to achieve your dreams? Do they exemplify the physical and mental traits that you aspire to? If they don’t, it could be why you feel like you’re less than you could be. Jim Rohn says, “You are the average of the five people you spend most time with.” If that’s true, who are that five, and is that the best you can do?

Let’s widen our focus. What characters on TV do you aim your unconscious at? Is your brain adapting you to become more like a character from Eastenders? Or Big Brother? I’ve definitely found that in the years since I stopped watching soaps and reality TV my outlook on life has changed for the better, and now I find them unbearably negative. The same goes for newspapers. I stopped reading them because I realised they never left me feeling better about the world. What do you watch, and read, and listen to? What message does it send your brain about who you should best be to survive? Whatever flows through our senses is our environment, and never in the history of humanity has there been more information available to choose from for that flow. The message is clear. If you want to be the best version of you can be, feed your brain the raw material to make you from. Watch a TED lecture instead of an episode of Coronation Street. Read something inspiring or aspirational instead of the Daily Miserable, go for a walk instead of sitting with a slice of cake, and audit your friends – spend more time with people who make you feel better about yourself and the world and who exemplify what you want for yourself, and ration the time you spend with friends who don’t.

What people who come on our hypnotherapy training often find is that the amazingly positive atmosphere, both in the classroom and on our forums – which usually get over a thousand page loads a day – in a subtle way begins to change their beliefs about what they can achieve. And now I can tell them why.

We’ve been running our hypnotherapy training now for over ten years, and one of the things we love about it is the range of people we get to meet. Probably the largest are those either looking to change careers or wanting to supplement the income from the one they have. As you’d expect, with the threat of redundancy looming over many we’ve seen a surge in people who are looking for something that’s available as an option should they need it. Our hypnotherapy course could be that thing. I’ve been practising for 18 years and still look forward to going to work. If helping people is something that gives you a buzz this is a really rewarding career.

The second largest group are people happy in their careers who are looking to supplement their skill set. Included among them are doctors and nurses, social and care workers, counsellors and psychotherapists. We even trained an Olympic gold medal winner who wanted to use Cognitive Hypnotherapy to boost his coaching. That year was our most successful Olympics in the sport he was our coach for, so we like to think we helped.

The third are people who simply like to explore and learn new things. All are welcome because it’s the mix that makes every group unique and interesting to teach.

You can click here for a prospectus. That will give you a lot of the information you’ll need, and here are reviews of the course from previous graduates. Often other people are the very best recommendation, and you’ll notice a lot of them emphasise how much support they get after graduation, from us and other graduates. We think that’s really important because we’re all stronger together. Building a successful business is a challenge, and we believe that your success will add to our success. If you’ve been looking for something, could this be it?

Something that might help your decision is a one day workshop called SelfHelpnosis, which teaches you easy techniques that can help with managing stress – for you or someone you know. It’s on Saturday the 19th March. Come along and, after the day, if it inspires you to do the Diploma the £70 cost of the workshop will be deducted from the cost of the course. We hope to see you there.

“You’re in the Evening Standard on page 3!”

After over ten years of working bloody hard to develop Cognitive Hypnotherapy into an approach that not only works, but which the public come to recognise, that has got to be a great message to get, so you can imagine how much I was looking forward to reading it.

The headline read: “You are feeling very slim: Hypnotist who wants to help Met lose weight”. Exsqueeze me? The interview with the journalist had been about the use of Cognitive Hypnotherapy as an alternative to gastric bands. This can’t be right…

I describe myself as “Derren Brown without the Jazz hands.” Errm, no I don’t. I vaguely remember the reporter suggesting the similarity and me, a bit embarrassed at the comparison, saying something dismissive like “well, without the jazziness”, meaning the needs of showbiz to spangle things up. I think I may have said that. But ‘Jazz hands’? What does that mean? Seriously, write and let me know. It’s the kind of thing an arse would say. Brilliant, so now people who don’t know me, up to and probably including Derren Brown, think I’m an arse. And I had hopes of us having a coffee together one day.

I’m described as a ‘cognitive hypnotherapist’. When I complained to the managing editor about the inaccuracies of the piece he replied that the article contained no criticism, either explicit or implicit. Predictably disingenuous. If I refer to the ‘reporter’ Tom Harper, you all understand I’m implying something by the inverted commas, don’t you?

He used Tom Harper’s notes to reject my complaint . Presumably the same notes that recorded the following comment, allegedly from me: “Supt Kholi wants to do the hypnotherapy programme. He was blown away by the idea as the Met are on a big health drive at the moment.” Both Supt Kohli and I are in complete agreement that we’ve never met or communicated. I didn’t even know his name, I just knew vaguely that he had spoken to my ThinkingSlimmer partner about the possibility of running a pilot study. I have no idea if the Met has an obesity problem. I did say, on the basis of personal experience, that it’s difficult to eat well and exercise on shift work.

So, it’s clear that the ‘reporter’ has been economical with the truth, but why? There were two positive bits of news here. The first is that the Met were investigating a promising method of improving the health of their officers at very little cost, and the second that Cognitive Hypnotherapy could provide an alternative, cheaper and non-invasive method of helping obese people compared to gastric band surgery. Why work so hard to make the story, “Met waste public money on wacky therapist? I rarely read newspapers – they never leave me feeling better – so I don’t know if my friends claim that the Evening Standard has an anti-police agenda is true. Whatever the reason, it’s a shame, and I was left deflated and feeling that I’d let my network of hardworking therapists down.

But on Saturday night I went for a meal with an ex-client. She reminded me, as she tucked into her goats cheese salad and garlic bread, that it was ten years ago that she first saw me. Her name is Chloe. Back then she was 17 and weighed 5 stone 2lb. She had anorexia and was going to be sectioned if her weight fell below 5 stone. She was told she would never have children as a result of the damage she had done to her body. Today, over 8 years since I saw her professionally, she is a mother of three lovely girls. She trained with me to be a Cognitive Hypnotherapist and now specialises in helping people with eating disorders. I didn’t watch her eat, the meal was just a natural medium to catch up in, but her plate was empty by the end. She used to cut her peas into four. Imagine how that meal made me feel. I mean it, imagine it. I love what I do. I believe it what it can achieve. So does she. So do the thousands of people who’ve been helped by this method over the last ten years by me or the people I’ve trained. So am I going to let inaccurate, lazy or dishonest ‘reporters’ stop me from banging our drum? Of course not. Onward and upward. And I haven’t given up hope on that cup of coffee.

I don’t believe for a minute that a ‘reporter’ like Tom Harper can get the same feeling from writing his stories that I do from being a ‘cognitive hypnotherapist’. And if he does, he needs to see one.

I was interested to read recently that the company who make Power Balance bands were forced to admit that there was no credible scientific evidence to support their claims. Before I go any further, for those of you who haven’t come across them, a Power Balance band is a silicon bracelet that contains two holograms which – the makers claimed – enhances your strength, balance and flexibility. Many celebrities and sports people, including David Beckham, have been seen wearing them and many swear by their effects.

I’ve been wearing one for several months. In fact I’ve worn two at different times: one I bought from their website, and one my son bought on EBay for £2 – ie a fake. The interesting thing is, I found that they both caused a measurable improvement in my performance – especially in my range of motion when kickboxing. What is particularly perplexing – and you’ll have to trust that I’m not just being wise after the event – is that I thought the science behind their claim was baloney from the start.

So why wear something you don’t believe in? Because it’s not me who has to believe it, it’s my unconscious mind that has to be fooled – and that’s not difficult.

Recent research has overturned the notion that the placebo effect only works if the person it is being used on isn’t aware of its nature. Prof. Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School divided a group of 80 IBS sufferers into two groups. One group received nothing, the other received tablets they were told were”placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS-symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes”. It even had ‘placebo’ printed on the bottle.

After three weeks almost twice as many patients treated with the placebo showed a significant relief of their symptoms compared to the control group.

I believe this happened for the same reason people get an effect from the Power balance band – even when they know it’s nonsense, and even when they know it’s fake nonsense.

We like to think of ourselves as logical and rational – and of course we can be, given the time. However, 90% of the actions we take are driven by the unconscious, and research is showing that it doesn’t use logic to decide on our responses to things, because the evolutionary drive that caused it to develop was based on a need to make rapid survival responses. So it uses a number of algorithms – calculations that lead to predictable outcomes. Some were identified by the Czech mathematician George Polya – he called them ‘patterns of plausible inference’. Others were described in psychologist Prof. Gerd Giggarenzer’s book Gut Feelings. He called them rules of thumb. Yet more were described by a world authority in the science of persuasion, Professor Robert Cialdini. They have come to be called Alpha Strategies. Simply put, they are the means by which we become unconsciously convinced by something – and it’s now recognised that the convincing is done largely out of our awareness, which is why the advertising industry uses them to sell us products, and why ‘neuromarketing’ is attracting a lot of attention. They can be very effective but, because they are designed to decide things quickly, they can be error-prone.

In the case of their being convinced that Power Balance bands work, for your unconscious, seeing is believing. There is a simple demonstration that ‘shows’ it increases people’s strength. I’ve done it on dozens of people – and I know that it works if I also use another object instead of the band (like a tangerine). However, the fact that the unconscious sees a demonstration that plausibly infers a quality possessed by the band, then it is likely to accept that quality as a fact. It’s a little like the visual illusion I’ve included here. Even when you prove to your conscious satisfaction that the balls in the centre are the same size you are still unable to update your impression that they are different. It can be the same with our problems. The change has to be convincing to the unconscious, and to convince it you have to play by its algorithms.

With the placebo experiment there are probably other algorithms at work. We have been conditioned to accept the notion that taking a pill will make us better, so even the symbolism of doing so can invoke a healing response. An Alpha strategy focuses on the power authority has to convince us – so in an experimental situation our unconscious is highly suggestible to people in white coats (for example). The word placebo has no effect, the factors that create it unconsciously do.

This is very important in Cognitive Hypnotherapy. We utilise these patterns all the time in our work with clients to influence their unconscious in such a way that they become convinced of their improvement. Our whole treatment planning is based around three core algorithms we call TAOTM (the algorithms of the mind) of which the others I’ve mentioned are examples. We uncover the patterns that are supporting the client’s issue and work to change them, and we identify the patterns that would convince them they’re getting better and we work to replace their problem patterns with their solution patterns.

We think the key thing is to do so at the unconscious level. Using our conscious, logical thinking can lead to a rewriting of the unconscious inferences that create our issues, but it tends to be hard work and quite clunky, and takes longer. Working more directly with the source of the issue – the unconscious – not only tends to bring benefits more quickly, it tends to be perceived as an easier process by the client.

So, don’t worry if people mock you for your magnetic bracelet, or your power balance band, or your healing crystal. If your unconscious has taken a shine to it, just enjoy the benefit you feel it brings. And remember that the problem that seems so hard to shift is just the result of the calculations your unconscious is making. The brain is plastic, these patterns can be changed, you can improve. I explain how in more detail in my new book.

I was disturbed recently by a long conversation with a friend who had recently completed his qualification in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I hadn’t been aware of how driven they had become by their interpretation of evidence-based practice. On the face of it, it seems a good idea, but from his reports it seems that the approach is causing them to become more and more set in the way clients can be treated – set protocols to be followed in response to particular diagnoses, the exclusion of anything that isn’t CBT, and a raising of orthodoxy to almost religious heights: my friend was actually marked down for diverting from an agenda set with his client in response to something the client brought up. Apparently the ‘correct’ thing to do was to agree on how much time to spend on this ‘diversion’, before returning to the set agenda. With 90% of our behaviour – including those we wish to change – being driven by our unconscious I find that such diversions lead to something more important far more often than something the conscious thinks is. And they seem so bound by their desire to classify the problem, to give each client a badge that neatly predicts their symptoms.

The trouble is, the minute you label a person’s problem you change it into something more than it is, or less than it is. It’s the nature of people to seek to give things names, but I think in therapy this can be extremely limiting. People do not fit neatly into boxes, any more than a list of symptoms to tick can fully conceptualise the individuals’ experience of their issue. In my opinion to work from the basis that therapeutic treatment should be dictated by a diagnosis leads us into stagnant waters. Let me explain why:

For someone to be diagnosed with a label like depression, or PTSD or anxiety disorder they have to have someone qualified to diagnose. For that person to be qualified they have to have a set of criteria to match against the clients symptoms. To be able to use that criteria they need to belong to an organisation that has agreed them. So we arrive at a situation where an organisation trains people to label other people through a set of agreed boxes to tick. Human nature being what it is, it isn’t long before, because they’ve labelled the problem, the members of that organisation begin to think they own it. It’s only a short step before the diagnosticians make the leap of saying that because they are the only people who can label the condition, they’re the only people who can treat it. A neat wall is soon built around the issue, policed by those within. And to prove that they have a right to deal exclusively with the sufferers they design experimental studies that rely on the diagnosis, and, to be scientific, they match specific protocols to each condition they want to own. Any therapist inside the wall has to stick to ‘the way’ of dealing with the problem, or else the results of their work can’t be considered ‘evidence’ of ‘the way’ working.

in the case of CBT , on the plus side, the evidence shows that the protocols work. On the negative side, they show they don’t work on everyone with the label, or completely in many cases – but still they’re pushing the government to only allow those approaches (i.e. within their wall) to be used for certain conditions. So what becomes of those not helped by CBT? At the moment they can come to someone else like me, but it seems that CBT is looking to close the door and exclude anybody using any approach that doesn’t fit their evidential criteria (i.e.that set by them to prove the efficacy of CBT).

At a recent NCH training event a senior CBT therapist told the audience that there was no evidence to support the use of NLP. In that audience were probably at least 20 people who were phobia or habit free – at the least – because of an NLP intervention. Couldn’t a raising of hands in that context be taken as evidence? From his position, no, because the approach used on each person had too many unknown variables for the conclusion to be safe. Zzzzzzzzzzz. And yet the 20 remain phobia or habit-free.

I think they could do with a dose of uncertainty.

In Cognitive Hypnotherapy we have taken the opposite path. We avoid a set way of working with set labels. We do not diagnose because:
a) We’re not qualified to – i.e. we haven’t jumped through the hoops to get inside the wall, and, more importantly,
b) We believe that every single person given a label doesn’t fit it exactly, and that those differences could be the key to their recovery.

So, if any client says “I have X (anxiety, depression, PTSD)”, our response is “How do you do that?” and we ask specific questions to identify and isolate the unique way the client creates and conceptualises their issue. From the understanding that arises from this process emerges a range of treatment options. And from CBT’s perspective that is a problem for us.

In Cognitive Hypnotherapy the flexibility that arises from the belief that there is no single protocol that works on all people, and that there are probably several different ways of achieving the same result with each client, means that it’s difficult to create an experiment to ‘evidence’ our approach in the way that CBT can. We like variables. We like creativity. We like using anything that works from anywhere. We follow the dictum of Perls and the great Gil Boyne to ‘deal with what emerges’ and don’t treat a client’s diversion from an agreed agenda as something to manage, but as something to investigate. How on earth do you evidence that? How do you evidence a therapy session where four different techniques might be strung together in response to what emerges during the therapy process? In a world where ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches are held up as the gold standard, suddenly the skill that enables a flexible and creative solution for any client who can’t be squeezed into the approach becomes a thing to be avoided, derided, and even feared. Orthodoxy becomes prized, innovation avoided.

I think we need a change of philosophy.

In a recent exercise conducted by the magazine Edge, scientists and philosophers were asked their opinion on the question “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” Overwhelmingly the answer was to be comfortable with uncertainty, know the limits of what science can tell us, and understand the worth of failure. It came at a very good moment for me; embracing uncertainty was a key theme in my latest book, Cognitive Hypnotherapy: What’s that about and How can I use it? Two simple questions for change.

As Neil Gershenfield, a director at MIT says, “The most common understanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don’t – they make and test models. Building models is very different from proclaiming truths. It’s a never-ending process of discovery and refinement, not a war to win or destination to reach. Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don’t know, not a weakness to avoid. Bugs are features – violations of expectations are opportunities to refine them. And decisions are made by evaluating what works better, not by invoking received wisdom.”

Nothing works on everybody. Everything works on somebody. Any research should be with the intention of creating better and better models from what works – from whatever approach it emerges – until we reach therapy Nirvana, not use it to try to exclude approaches other than our own, or convince government that our way is the only way. If CBT manages to convince the powers-that-be as well as they seem to be convincing themself then what we could be left with is the exclusion of other ideas that have their place in the evolution of therapy – which can only be to the detriment of those in need. That is where I fear the current situation with CBT is leading.

We’re about to begin a research programme to show that the flexibility of Cognitive Hypnotherapy works – in a form that NICE and anybody else in the mainstream will accept – but what we want to come from it is to also show where it falls short and where it can be improved. Failure is simply information that can lead to improvement. And in the gathering of information we need to recognise what science is good at quantifying, and what it isn’t, and choose our evidential methods according to what is acceptably compelling, rather than purely scientifically measurable.

Imagine a world where all the walls erected around different therapies were taken down and we shared what we know – including that we don’t know enough.

In my book I finished with this: “Therapy should be a unified field bound by a communal curiosity about what can make us more skilled at being human. That’s what I want Cognitive Hypnotherapy to be about; permanent revolution driven by curiosity, united by uncertainty, guided by evidence, and always in a state of growth.”

It’s something to work for, isn’t it?

At Quest we’re always keen to develop talent, and we think we’ve discovered a young lady who is going to bring fresh energy to our hospitality department.

With the sad loss of our Hospitality Director, Barney, in November 2010, we’ve clearly been missing something in the area of student interface – mainly a cold nose and a warm welcome.

Wilma impressed us greatly in her interview, and, as you can see from this picture of her first morning in the office, has slotted straight into Barney’s favourite position. With her getting to grips with her office responsibilities so quickly we hope to introduce her to her college duties early in 2011.

We’re looking forward to her breaking the stereotype of YTS girls, and quickly working her way up the corporate ladder. For those of you wondering, she’s a miniature Schnauzer, currently 8 weeks old.

Apparently up to about 80% of our thoughts seems to be verbal rather than visual or emotional – at least according to recent research at the University of Nevada. This finding emerges from a field of study that’s looking at the power words have to influence our perceptions – i.e. the way we see the world.

As someone who uses words as the tools of my trade, this area is obviously of great interest. I wrote Wordweaving: The Science of Suggestion in 2003 to describe a model for creating hypnotic suggestion that moves away from using a set script based on the client’s problem, to a flexible system that allows you to spontaneously create suggestions within a session, based, not on the label the client has for their issue, but on the individual way the client will have of experiencing that issue.

What I was heartened to see in a recent article in New Scientist on the power of words to mould our perceptions was research that validates some of the key principles within WordweavingTM and Cognitive Hypnotherapy.
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Experiments have shown that a great deal of the sense we have of ourselves, of the feeling of the kind of person we are, is gained from our interpretation of our surroundings. If we continually find ourselves in a negative environment we tend to become the kind of person you find in such a place – which is why it’s so important to pick the right friends. I always find it fascinating when there are clues that things we do appear to just be the result of evolution copying something that’s been shown to work at more simple levels of life. The fact that single-cell organisms move towards reward and away from danger, and so do we, is one example, and this use of the world around us to determine our identity may be another.

It’s well-known that stem cells can become any kind of cell in the body, but the mechanism for how it achieves this amazing trick isn’t understood. Now researchers have found that stem cells may use its environment to give it clues about its purpose. For example, if you place stem cells in a current of liquid they turn into blood vessels.

I found this a very exciting discovery, because it validates the expectations of a theory of Bruce Lipton, the author of The Biology of Belief. In this book Lipton claims that what is called the Central Dogma of Biology – that our DNA is responsible for what happens to us – is wrong. Instead he puts forward an idea that suggests the primacy of the environment – that our DNA does nothing unless it receives a message from an environmental signal to do so. In another blog article I’ve described how this gives us – Cognitive Hypnotherapists – a model to work with that provides a scientific rationale for the principle that the mind can have a physical effect on the body, i.e. that our suggestions can cause a positive response on the health of our clients. But what this latest discovery gives us is an idea about how specifically to achieve that.
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